Need help with recovery of KDE

[LoD]

Hello everyone,

I have fallen victim of a false assumption today - namely that the behavior of the Adept Updater is always non-destructive. I've let it run with the list it pre-selected - and then, after reboot, I've found myself thrown into Bash.

I've eventually managed to find out that the Updater has removed some nonessential packages - like, say, konqueror, or kdm. After tinkering for a fair bit of time with APT (and learning some new things in the process), I've managed to at least reinstall kdm and kicker, by downgrading their dependencies.

However, I haven't made any further progress, because of something like this:

sudo apt-get install --reinstall kdesktop=4:3.5.6-0ubuntu20

Yielding (translated) :

kdesktop: Requires: kdebase-bin (= 4:3.5.6-0ubuntu20) but 4:3.5.7-0ubuntu1~feisty1 is to be installed

Of course, kdebase-bin is 3.5.6 right now (was required to reinstall kdm). Same thing happens with konqueror, amarok, and other stuff that currently remains missing.

It looks like virtually everything but kdm is version 3.5.7 in the repostiories, except for the kdm package itself, which is 3.5.6. I have no idea what caused this situation, I've tried running apt-get update, but it didn't help (and I'm too afraid of losing kdm again to run upgrade).

Help please?

[eriefisher]

Re: Need help with recovery of KDE

Try to reinstall the whole desktop.

sudo apt-get install kubuntu-desktop

It might grab everything this way.

eriefisher

[LoD]

Re: Need help with recovery of KDE

Thanks for the reply!

Unfortunately - no worky. Same problem - incompatible versions for more than 10 required and recommended packages.

Hmm... the install DVD counts as an additional repository, doesn't it? I suppose I could try getting an older version of the desktop from there? If so, I have two additional questions:
1. How do I reliably check for the available versions of a package? I've tried

apt-show-versions -a -p packagename

but at least in one instance it turned out that a non-listed older version was available in the repository.
2. Which KDE-configuration files (if any) should I back up, just in case?

[LoD]

Re: Need help with recovery of KDE

Err... anyone?

[eriefisher]

Re: Need help with recovery of KDE

Apt by default will look for newer versions. If you remove your sources.list, update and then add the dvd and update again the only packages it will see is whats on the dvd. You should be able to install/downgrade this way.

sudo mv /etc/apt/sources.list /etc/apt/sources.list_old
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-cdrom add
sudo apt-get update